Lenovo Yoga 3 Tablet 8″ Review

Low Cost With Insane Battery Life

One of the things I’ve always loved about Lenovo’s Yoga tablet lineup is the design. These tablets incorporate a great, practical design, but they’re not always cheap. However with the Lenovo Yoga 3 Tablet 8”, that’s not the case. Starting at $169, what can you expect from this device? Let’s find out.

Specs

8” 1280×800 IPS Display

Snapdragon 210 Processor

1GB RAM

16GB Storage (microSD up to 128GB)

8MP Rotating Camera

6,200mAh Battery

Hardware/Design

As I mentioned, I love the design of this tablet. It looks pretty nice, but that’s not the focus. Rather it focuses on how you would generally use your tablet. For most people, that’s in two major ways. 1) Reading, 2) watching videos. To improve both experiences the Yoga 3 Tablet 8” has a “cylinder” on it’s left side which houses the battery, the camera, and a metal kickstand. The rest of the tablet curves into becoming a very thin slate. This assists in holding the tablet when reading because you have far more grip with one hand and it puts all the weight in one place. When watching videos, that’s when the kickstand shines.

By pressing a button on the back of the tablet, the metal kickstand pops out and can support the tablet at a variety of different angles. I found that I could easily place the tablet at just the right angle for watching videos on YouTube or Hulu and even for when I decided to break out a Bluetooth keyboard and get some writing done.

Display

The 8” display on this tablet is nothing to brag about. With a resolution of 1280×800 it’s not the sharpest out there, but the color reproduction, viewing angles, and brightness are all great. Lenovo has even enabled Android’s ambient display for this tablet. While the lack of AMOLED does mean that the entire display turns on when this feature is in use, I still enjoy having the feature on this device and it doesn’t seem to hurt battery life at all.

Software/Performance

One of the biggest gripes I’ve had in the past with Lenovo’s Android tablets has been the software on board. Luckily, it seems they’ve fixed that this time around. The Yoga 3 Tablet 8” runs Android 5.1 out of the box and while Lenovo does skin it, the skin is not very heavy.

Performance is pretty decent considering the Snapdragon 210 processor under the hood. I notice dropped frames on a regular basis, but overall I was pretty pleased. Multi-tasking is also not amazing considering the single 1GB of RAM, but again, I’m pretty pleased. Gaming was the real surprise as I could easily play light games on this tablet with no issue at all.

Speakers

Sitting underneath the display on this tablet are two front facing stereo speakers. While you wouldn’t expect much from a tablet at this price point, these speakers are actually really good. Sound was crisp and volume could be quite loud, but at higher volumes things did tend to distort just a bit.

Battery Life

The absolute biggest highlight of this tablet is the battery life. With the embedded 6,200mAh battery, this tablet can get you, quite literally, days of power on a single charge. I was able to pull 4 days or more of use on this device and I would still have power left over. That’s not on particularly light usage either, I was able to get almost 4 hours of screen on time in during that time period. Pretty impressive if you ask me.

Final Thoughts

So overall, is this tablet worth getting? At $169, it’s definitely worth considering. This is a great tablet for media consumption and even some basic work. It’s not amazing, but it’s definitely worth the price. The only complaint I really have is the lack of RAM, it’s begging for 2GB, but regardless, it’s a solid little device.

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YourTechExplained is our vision to enlighten everyday people about the technology in their homes and pockets. Many people have smartphones, tablets, and computers but many do not know how to properly use them. Young or old there is always an opportunity to learn more about the technology in our lives. Our goal is to help everyone learn about the devices they use and how the changes in the industry can affect them.